And Jean had another reason for going to Munich. In all her travels around Europe, she had never visited the site of her grandparents’ death, and Dachau lay just fifteen miles or so north of central Munich. She had seen pictures online of the memorial site—the reconstructed barracks where her grandparents had been imprisoned, the guard towers and the postwar memorials. But she had never felt the need to stand there and pay her own tribute. Now, after the way Ingrid Weiss had abused the memory of her grandfather, she felt drawn to the site, as if she could somehow defend the honor of the grandfather she never knew by standing on the spot where he had been silenced by the Nazi Reich. She thought of the words of one of the memorials at Dachau, inscribed in Hebrew, French, English, German, and Russian: “Never again.” There was certainly no comparison between Ingrid Weiss’s little ruse and the genocide of the Nazis, but nonetheless, Jean wanted to put a stop to whatever was going on at Columbia House. She wanted to look Ingrid Weiss in the eye and say, “Never again.”

Jean managed to sleep a few hours on the overnight flight to Vienna. The conference organizers had booked a block of rooms at a cheap hotel outside the Ringstrasse, but Jean had decided to treat herself to two nights at the Hotel Sacher across the street from the opera house. Her room wasn’t ready when she arrived at the hotel at nine, so she drank two cups of Franziskaner—strong Viennese espresso topped with frothy, rich, steamed milk and made magical with a lump of cream—in the café, then presented herself to the concierge and asked if he could book her a train to Munich. If she resisted the temptation to get off the train in Salzburg, he informed her, she could be in Munich by early afternoon.

When he handed her the ticket, the concierge slipped her a carefully wrapped slice of Sacher torte. “In case you get hungry,” he said.

As the train pulled out of Vienna in the morning light, Jean switched on her phone long enough to check her messages. Other than a “Bon voyage and be careful,” from Peter Byerly there was nothing worth reading. She switched off the phone and settled back in her seat, watching the foreign landscape slide by the window.